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The industry leader in emerging technology researchThu, 24 May 2018 17:25:15 +0000en-UShourly1Senate backs down on ‘Facebook Bureau of Investigations’ mandatehttp://gigaom.com/2015/09/22/senate-backs-down-on-facebook-bureau-of-investigations-mandate/
http://gigaom.com/2015/09/22/senate-backs-down-on-facebook-bureau-of-investigations-mandate/#commentsTue, 22 Sep 2015 19:16:13 +0000https://gigaom.com/?p=920379Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking companies no longer have to worry about a mandate that would have required them to share with the United States government information about users discussing terrorism-related topics.

Not only is this great news for young students wishing to share info on self-made clock projects, but also for a large portion of citizens that don’t want the feds sifting through private social data without a warrant.

In an effort to pass a funding bill for federal intelligence agencies, the Senate has recently abandoned a provision that would force social networks to share data on users believed to be involved with terrorism activities. The bill itself was initially blocked from reaching the Senate floor by Sen. Ron Wyden, who described the mandate as a “vague [and] dangerous provision.” Wyden said in a statement Monday that he plans to release his hold on the bill, thus allowing it to move forward.

“Going after terrorist recruitment and activity online is a serious mission that demands a serious response from our law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” Wyden said. “Social media companies aren’t qualified to judge which posts amount to ‘terrorist activity,’ and they shouldn’t be forced against their will to create a Facebook Bureau of Investigations to police their users’ speech.”

But the spirit of the provision is unlikely to be gone for long.

A spokesperson for Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Hill that the senator “regrets having to remove the provision” and “believes it’s important to block terrorists’ use of social media to recruit and incite violence and will continue to work on achieving that goal.” It’ll be back.

This is merely the latest in a string of examples of the government pressuring tech companies to provide it with more information, or to help it take down content related to extremist organizations like the so-called Islamic State. Other efforts relate to encryption, censorship, and access to private communications.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/09/22/senate-backs-down-on-facebook-bureau-of-investigations-mandate/feed/2Politwoops shutdown raises questions about Twitter’s ruleshttp://gigaom.com/2015/08/25/politwoops-shutdown-raises-questions-about-twitters-rules/
Tue, 25 Aug 2015 20:30:59 +0000https://gigaom.com/?p=920190Can social websites protect their users while still allowing outside groups to hold politicians and other public figures accountable for their statements?

That’s the question at the heart of a recent controversy between Twitter and Politwoops, a series of websites that archived politicians’ deleted tweets whose access to Twitter’s public API was revoked without warning over the weekend.

Twitter made a similar move earlier this year when it shut down the United States version of Politwoops. The many versions of this tweet-archiving tool were run by two separate groups — the Sunlight Foundation and the Open State Foundation — and both have expressed their concern over Twitter’s decision.

Both groups tell me there are no negotiations in place to restore Politwoops’ access to Twitter’s API. But Arjan el Fassad, the director of the Open State Foundation, did say that the group is “exploring a number of legal and technical options” to see if it can build a similar tool without access to Twitter’s API.

“We believe that what public officials, especially politicians, publicly say is a matter of public record,” Fassad told me. “Even when tweets are deleted, it’s part of parliamentary history. Although Twitter can restrict access to its API, it will not be able to keep deleted tweets by elected public officials in the dark.”

A spokesperson for the Sunlight Foundation said that group has no plans to rebuild Politwoops without access to Twitter’s data stream. Yet the group is no less damning in its stance on Twitter’s decision to revoke the tool’s access to information that was publicly available through multiple outlets before now.

“To prevent public oversight when our representatives try to discreetly change their messaging represents a significant corporate change of heart on the part of Twitter and a major move on their part to privatize public discourse,” they said.

“Imagine if the Washington Post printed a retraction of a story, would it demand that all copies delivered to the home with the original story be returned? When a public statement is made, no matter the medium, can it simply be deleted and claimed as a proprietary piece of information?”

Of course, there is a difference between the Washington Post trying to retrieve a physical object and Twitter cutting off access to its service. And “unpublishing” stories, whether it’s to appease advertisers or because they contained factual errors or were plagiarized from another source, happens at online publications.

For its part, Twitter says it’s merely trying to protect its users. A spokesperson said in a statement that the “ability to delete one’s Tweets – for whatever reason – has been a long-standing feature of Twitter for all users” and that it “will continue to defend and respect our users’ voices in our product and platform.”

I came to a similar conclusion when the U.S. version of Politwoops was shut down. As I wrote at the time:

Twitter isn’t only defending politicians; it’s protecting all of its users. I suspect there are more private citizens than politicians using the platform, so if having a reasonable expectation of privacy makes things harder for a site that collects politicians’ gaffes, well, I’m happy to bid Politwoops a fond, but prompt, adieu.

Both the Sunlight Foundation and Open State Foundation have said that they avoided this issue by focusing Politwoops on politicians. There should be a clear distinction between public figures and other Twitter users, both argued, and others have said that Twitter is either incompetent or capitulating to politicians.

This is a thorny issue without a clear solution. Twitter can be blamed for blocking Politwoops’ access to its service because each of these groups argues that they were holding politicians accountable; it could also be chastised for allowing these groups to break the rules meant to protect its users’ privacy.

Let me put it another way: If a restaurant had tinted windows to prevent outside observers from taking pictures of its diners, should it have to smash them whenever a politician or other public figure enters? Probably not. Its patrons, regardless of their status, expect to be afforded the same privacy.

It’s more troublesome that Twitter changed its mind about Politwoops. As the Sunlight Foundation notes in its blog post about this weekend’s shut down:

In 2012, Sunlight started the U.S. version of Politwoops. At the time, Twitter informed us that the project violated its terms of service, but we explained the goals of the project and agreed to create a human curation workflow to ensure that the site screened out corrected low-value tweets, like typos as well as incorrect links and Twitter handles. We implemented this layer of journalistic judgment with blessings from Twitter and the site continued. In May, Twitter reversed course and shut down Sunlight’s version of Politwoops.

It seems that Twitter was fine with smashing its own windows for three years, provided that Politwoops only used its exceptional ability to ignore the rules governing its API for things that actually matter to the public. Why did it change its mind, and why did months pass between the shuttering of the U.S. version of Politwoops and the revocation of these international versions’ access?

Consistent rules can be lived with and worked around. Inconsistent rules, however, lend some credence to the idea that Twitter might not be wise enough to decide what outside groups can do with public tweets. The company should have either shut down Politwoops before or allowed it to run into perpetuity.

In a way, it’s a lot like the controversy created whenever Politwoops did catch deleted tweets that shamed the politicians who sent them. Many of those tweets would have been fine if they hadn’t been deleted; it was only when their senders tried to act like they never existed that problems arose. It’s hard not to appreciate the symmetry between that and Twitter’s current situation.

]]>Judge halts movie industry-backed probe against Googlehttp://gigaom.com/2015/03/02/judge-halts-movie-industry-backed-probe-against-google/
http://gigaom.com/2015/03/02/judge-halts-movie-industry-backed-probe-against-google/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 19:25:05 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=918163A federal judge has agreed to put the brakes on an investigation into Google by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood after the company complained that Hood’s inquiry was an illegal censorship campaign cooked up by Hollywood.

In a Monday ruling, U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate issued an order that will temporarily bar Hood from forcing Google to comply with the terms of a 79-page subpoena.

“Today, a federal court entered a preliminary injunction against a subpoena issued by the Mississippi Attorney General. We’re pleased with the court’s ruling, which recognizes that the MPAA’s long-running campaign to censor the web—which started with SOPA—is contrary to federal law,” Google wrote in an update to an earlier blog post describing the case.

The ruling by Judge Wingate came from the bench, and a written version is expected to follow in the next week or two.

“Google has the better side of the legal arguments,” the judge told the court, according to a spokesperson for the company.

The ruling is a major victory for Google, which filed a lawsuit challenging Hood’s 79-page subpoena in December.

The ostensible goal of the subpoena is to help Hood discover if Google is violating Mississippi laws by exposing internet users to drugs and pornography. Google, however, filed a court challenge on the ground Hood overstepped federal laws that shield internet companies from liability for what others post online.

The case has also taken on an air of intrigue in light of a secret scheme, known as “Project Goliath,” that came to light as a result of the massive hack on Sony in December 2014.

Documents disclosed by the hack suggested that the Attorney General’s campaign against Google was being underwritten by the Motion Picture Association of American, and even involved movie industry lawyers drafting legal papers for the state. The company has characterized the state investigation as a dirty-tricks campaign by the movie industry to promote the goals of a failed anti-piracy law known as SOPA.

Hood has already come under fire for being among Democratic state attorneys general who appear to have been farming out the investigative powers of their offices to private law firms in return for a cut of the profits.

Monday’s ruling does not put an end to Mississippi’s investigation, but rather puts it on hold while the parties file more evidence. Hood has tried to frame his investigation as a populist campaign on behalf of the state’s citizens and argued that Google should pursue its claims of over-stepping in state, not federal court.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/03/02/judge-halts-movie-industry-backed-probe-against-google/feed/1Why we need social media: Press freedom is still declining rapidlyhttp://gigaom.com/2015/02/12/why-we-need-social-media-press-freedom-is-still-declining-rapidly/
http://gigaom.com/2015/02/12/why-we-need-social-media-press-freedom-is-still-declining-rapidly/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 18:11:27 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=914535We see the pressure that journalism and the media are under from governments around the world when journalists are jailed in countries like Egypt, or murdered, or silenced in various other ways. But it’s not until we get a global picture from something like the annual World Press Freedom Index that it becomes obvious how endangered a free press has become — even in the United States, which has fallen steadily in the media-freedom rankings every year.

If nothing else, this kind of overview reinforces one thing: Namely, the necessity and importance of having alternative forms of media and speech, whether it’s Twitter and YouTube and Instagram or a media entity like WikiLeaks. These can be blocked and content can be banned by governments, but it is harder to do. In effect, it forces repressive governments to play a giant game of Whack-A-Mole by going after every individual user who posts a photo or uploads a video.

Difficult to ban or block

Turkey, for example, has been trying very hard over the past year to get content removed from and/or blocked by Twitter — including an account belonging to an opposition newspaper — and the government’s court orders for personal information have skyrocketed. To Twitter’s credit, the company has resisted these orders, and is fighting others in court, and the social network remains a crucial lifeline for many citizens who are trying to keep track of what their government is doing to its own people.

And why would something like WikiLeaks be important, despite the various well-documented flaws in that organization and its leader Julian Assange? Because press freedom in the United States has been declining for years. According to the index, the U.S. is now in 49th place — behind the tiny Polynesian nation of Tonga — compared with just five years ago, when it was in 20th place. The government’s ongoing campaign against WikiLeaks is part of that, as is the action taken against journalists like James Risen, who has resisted attempts to get him to reveal his sources.

A drastic decline

The Press Freedom index is compiled every year by the group Reporters Without Borders, which was founded in 1985 and campaigns on behalf of journalists around the world, as well as tracking abuse and repression directed towards the media. And the latest survey comes to a rather grim conclusion: press freedom has declined dramatically around the world, with more than half of the 180 countries ranking lower.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”There was a drastic decline in freedom of information in 2014. Two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed for the 2015 World Press Freedom Index performed less well than in the previous year. The annual global indicator, which measures the overall level of violations of freedom of information in 180 countries year by year, has risen to 3,719, an 8 percent increase over 2014 and almost 10 percent compared with 2013.”[/blockquote]

In the most recent survey, many of the usual suspects show up in the negative column: Libya, where journalists continue to be kidnapped and in some cases murdered, and Russia — where the government has blocked websites and even shut down alternative media outlets that were critical of the administration. Also in the bad-and-getting-worse column are countries like South Sudan, Venezuela and even Italy, where journalists have been threatened by criminal groups like the Mafia.

New media is everywhere

Reporters Without Borders also mentions how some areas of the world are effectively “black holes” when it comes to measuring the freedom of the press, and many of these dark spots appear in the region that is at the bottom of the global index — North Africa and the Middle East. Many areas, the group says, “are controlled by non-state groups in which independent information simply does not exist.”

Obviously, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram — or even entities like WikiLeaks — aren’t a solution to these kinds of systemic problems. But the simple fact that individuals around the world now have access to some or all of the same tools that journalists do means that we can get information directly from places like Egypt or Iran or Turkey, without having to rely on a professional press that has been muzzled or brought to heel.

That’s why some of the new-media efforts I think are the most interesting and important are the ones that are trying to harness this vast volunteer workforce in some way, whether it’s through verification tools like Storyful, or online community efforts like Reportedly from First Look Media, or crowdsourcing like the Ukraine Vehicle project that British blogger Eliot Higgins recently launched.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/12/why-we-need-social-media-press-freedom-is-still-declining-rapidly/feed/5Google advisory council: Right to delist should only apply in EUhttp://gigaom.com/2015/02/06/google-advisory-council-right-to-delist-should-only-apply-in-eu/
http://gigaom.com/2015/02/06/google-advisory-council-right-to-delist-should-only-apply-in-eu/#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 09:56:13 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=913030To help it handle the EU ruling that forces it to delist certain results about people, Google assembled a team of expert advisors that travelled the continent, seeking out various opinions on how best to implement Europeans’ data protection rights. On Friday that advisory council published its report, providing recommendations for the way forward.

The Google advisors’ report (embedded below) makes for a fascinating read, but the highlights are its assertion that the delisting should only apply in Europe, and its nuanced discussion of when publishers or webmasters should be notified of delisting.

The ruling was about data that’s inadequate, irrelevant or excessive – it’s a fundamental right in Europe that people can have such data deleted, and the Court of Justice of the European Union decided last year that this data protection right can be applied to search engines.

The global question

The advisors’ call for a limited geographical scope in applying the so-called “right to be forgotten” – Google’s favored term, but one the group strenuously objected to – directly contradicts the guidance given by the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) band of EU data protection regulators.

WP29 argued that, if the link to the data in question is only removed from Google’s European domains, it’s far too easy for people to access other Google domains, therefore the delisting should take place globally. Indeed, one of Google’s advisors, former German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, agreed with this in a dissenting opinion in today’s report.

Overall, though, the council said delisting should only apply in Europe. Its report acknowledged that global delisting “may ensure more absolute protection of a data subject’s rights”, but it pointed out that Google users outside Europe had the right to access information according to their own country’s laws, not those of EU countries.

It continued:

There is also a competing interest on the part of users within Europe to access versions of search other than their own. The Council heard evidence about the technical possibility to prevent Internet users in Europe from accessing search results that have been delisted under European law. The Council has concerns about the precedent set by such measures, particularly if repressive regimes point to such a precedent in an effort to ‘lock’ their users into heavily censored versions of search results.

Notifications

On the subject of whether or not to notify publishers that one of their pages is going to be delisted due to a data subject exercising their right, the council noted that it had “received conflicting input about the legal basis for such notice.” It then provided something of a fudge: “Given the valid concerns raised by online publishers, we advise that, as a good practice, the search engine should notify the publishers to the extent allowed by law.”

In other words, do what the law allows, whatever that is. In the opinion of WP29, contacting the webmasters in this way may itself involve “processing” of the subject’s data, which requires a legal basis – and there is none. However, the advisory council and WP29 did agree on one aspect of this question: If the decision to delist a particular piece of information is especially complex and difficult, it may be helpful to all concerned if the search engine could ask the publisher or webmaster for help.

The council also suggested four broad categories of criteria that Google and other search engines should apply when deciding on specific cases:

The data subject’s role in public life (Is the person a celebrity or do they have a special role in a certain profession?)

The nature of the information (Is it about the subject’s sex life or finances? Does it include private contact or other sensitive information? Is it true or false? Does it relate to public health or consumer protection or criminal information? Is it integral to the historical record? Is it art?

The source of the information (Does it come from journalists or “recognized bloggers”? Was it published by the subjects themselves and can they easily remove it?)

Time (Is the information about a long-past minor crime? Was it about a crime that’s relevant to the subject’s current role? How prominent were they at the time? Is the data about the subject’s childhood?)

The advisors recommended that Google’s delisting request form should have more fields so the subject can submit more information that will help the balancing test – for example, in which geographical area they’re publicly known, or whether their role in public life was deliberately adopted or not.

Other opinions

The dissenting opinions at the end of the report were interesting. That of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was the starkest – “the recommendations to Google contained in this report are deeply flawed due to the law itself being deeply flawed” – as he entirely opposes the concept of a company being forced to adjudicate between free expression and privacy.

Frank La Rue, the former U.N. free speech rapporteur, also said this shouldn’t be down to Google, arguing that only a state authority should be establishing criteria and procedures for privacy protection. La Rue also criticized the scope of the EU’s data protection itself, saying data should only be removed or delisted if it is “malicious, is false, or produces serious harm to an individual.”

Overall, I think the report is an important document. There are of course many reasons to criticize the process that led to its drafting – it was done according to Google’s terms and timescale, and under the misleading banner of the “right to be forgotten” – and some of its recommendations don’t actually gel with current EU law:

3) Council wants to insert a “harm” criterion into fundamental right to data protection.
Nice idea but… you’d have to change the law. #RTD

However, I think it’s fair to say the council members were independent-minded and not all singing from the same hymn sheet. Ultimately, as a counterpart to the Article 29 Working Party’s more legalistic set of recommendations (that is their job after all), this was a valuable exercise in chewing over the deeper implications of that CJEU ruling.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/02/06/google-advisory-council-right-to-delist-should-only-apply-in-eu/feed/2Emily Bell: Social networks and journalists need to work togetherhttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/emily-bell-social-networks-and-journalists-need-to-work-together/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/emily-bell-social-networks-and-journalists-need-to-work-together/#commentsFri, 30 Jan 2015 16:42:26 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=911219As we’ve described here a number of times, one of the biggest disruptions in the media industry has been on the distribution end — the actual creation of journalism and other content has also changed, but even more important is the shift from media outlets controlling the channel (newspaper, magazine, TV network) to relying on outside platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google for distribution and attention.

That has brought with it a host of challenges, including ethical ones around how free speech and freedom of the press are handled by social networks that have no journalistic motivations or constraints whatsoever.

This is the landscape that Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, recently tried to outline in a speech to journalists in Britain given in honor of Hugh Cudlipp, former chairman of the Daily Mirror newspaper group. In a nutshell, Bell — the former head of digital operations at The Guardian — argues that both sides, social platforms and journalists, need each other more than they think.

Rise of the tabloid web

As Bell points out, most newsrooms — even the slow-moving, traditionally-focused ones like the New York Times — have come to realize that they need to understand and take advantage of the social sharing that platforms like Facebook provide, because that is how content works now. Everyone wants to “go viral.” In a sense, the web is encouraging everyone to think like the editor of a tabloid newspaper like the Daily Mirror. What do readers want and how can we give it to them as quickly as possible?

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Today, the new newsroom has optimisation desks, to make stories work better on social media, data scientists who analyse the information about story performance to tell journalists how to write headlines, produce photographs and report stories which will be ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ more than others. It has aggregation desks, which scour the web to find news that ordinary people have posted for a wider audience.”[/blockquote]

Control has been lost

The problem — as Bell outlined in a similar lecture last year at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — is that journalists and media companies no longer have any control whatsoever over what happens to their content once they publish it. Proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter and Google are now the power brokers who determine who sees your story and when, and their decisions are made for reasons that may have nothing to do with the journalistic quality of your content.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”We are seeing unimaginably large new entities, which get their size from publishing not just a selected number of stories but everything in the world. Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.”[/blockquote]

As publicly-traded companies with a bottom line to look after, these platforms have their own interests to protect, Bell says — and that means they may be less than inclined to support or defend principles that journalists take for granted, such as free speech or freedom of the press. While Twitter makes a point of challenging court orders and fighting government requests for the blocking of content, and Google has also been known to do this, Facebook seems more than happy to remove content, in many cases without notice.

As Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out on a number of occasions, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become the new public square, except it isn’t public at all — it’s more like a shopping mall, where private security can have you removed at will. Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon made a similar point in her book Consent of the Networked, about how much of what we consider free speech has been taken over by private corporations. Says Bell:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Google and Facebook are magnitudes larger and richer than any other entities, and more influential in terms of reach than any press company in history. Until now though, the default position of participants in the sharing economy, with the exception perhaps of Twitter, has been to avoid the expensive responsibilities and darker, more complex aspects of hosting the free press.”[/blockquote]

We need each other

As an example, Bell points to Google handing over personal information about members of WikiLeaks to the U.S. government, something she calls “a chilling reminder of either how little Google understands what supporting free speech means or its naked dishonesty.” No serious news organization would ever do such a thing she says, and it calls Google’s trustworthiness as a platform into question (Google has since said that it tried to alert those users to the government’s secret court order, but was prevented from doing so).

It’s not just Facebook and Google that Bell is concerned about, however. There are other broader issues that the democratization of journalism brings up, she says — issues that were highlighted in two recent cases: one in which Jordi Mir filmed a French police officer being shot after the attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and another in which Ramsey Orta filmed a New York police officer choking Eric Garner, who subsequently died.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Mir and Orta are not journalists, but they were sources. They were not on the staff of any newspaper or agency; they were not paid a salary; they had had no training; they were not members of any union, they have no added protections that might be afforded to the press [but] we have a responsibility towards them in both a broad and specific sense. They might not be journalists but they are part of our ecosystem of news.”[/blockquote]

The bottom line, Bell says, is that journalists and technology companies or social platforms need to work together to figure out how to handle the atomized, networked and democratized media environment we all find ourselves in. It’s not enough for Facebook or Google to say they aren’t journalistic organizations and therefore they don’t have a duty to consider things like free speech — they are functioning as journalistic tools, and they have a larger responsibility to society.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Journalism needs a lot more journalists who are technically proficient, and the new gods, the platform companies, social networks and search engines, need to hire a lot more technologists who are proficient in news. Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us… we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop.”[/blockquote]

I think Bell is right — social networks like Facebook need the content that comes from media outlets because that’s what drives the engagement they need to sell advertising. But journalism and journalistic organizations should get something in return, and that is a commitment to at least consider the principles that should apply to such content, since they now control how and when (or even if) people see it. If the algorithm is the new editor, then it needs to be held to account for its decisions in the same way an editor would be.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/emily-bell-social-networks-and-journalists-need-to-work-together/feed/1How social media affects protest movements: It’s complicatedhttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/28/how-social-media-affects-protest-movements-its-complicated/
Wed, 28 Jan 2015 23:32:18 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=910690If you mention social-media platforms like Twitter or Facebook in the context of political uprisings in places like Turkey or Ukraine or Egypt — or even the Occupy movement in the United States — the person you’re speaking to will likely either a) agree that they can be very powerful tools, or b) argue that they are just sound and fury, signifying nothing, and have had no real effect on the outcome of these movements.

But the truth is actually much more complex, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who has spent her career studying the effects of such social platforms on political behavior.

In a paper published in the Journal of International Affairs, Tufekci looks at this question in detail, based on her observations of and interviews with protesters in her native Turkey and elsewhere. And her conclusion is that while social platforms can have a positive impact on the ability of dissidents and alternative political movements to organize and communicate — as she has described in previous articles looking at social tools and the political “tipping points” they helped to trigger — they can also have far-reaching negative effects.

Crucial information source

The benefits are obvious when looking at uprisings like the “Arab Spring” in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, or the political events leading up to the more recent Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Tufecki says. In the latter case, social media became a crucial source of news, in part because the traditional media in Turkey weren’t covering the demonstrations for fear of upsetting the government. And in Egypt, mobile phones and blogs became the tools of a protest movement that ultimately helped unseat the government:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”The advent of blogging and the rise of cheap cell phones with video cameras also created major changes as activists started acquiring, publishing, and circulating video evidence of the many grievances that made every day life difficult for citizens.”[/blockquote]

By giving dissidents the ability to share this kind of information quickly, social tools such as Facebook (which was much more widely used in Egypt than Twitter) made it easy to connect groups of protesters and plan events. That kind of organizational feature can have a powerful psychological impact, Tufekci has said, because once people know that others share their beliefs or feelings about a movement it becomes easier to take collective action, something she calls an “information cascade.”

The landscape has changed since the Arab Spring, however. As the University of North Carolina professor and Harvard Berkman Center fellow notes in her paper, governments have more or less caught up to political protesters when it comes to social media. Twitter and Facebook aren’t just for nerds any more — they have become mainstream, and that means governments have figured out not only how to block them (or how to force Twitter and Facebook to remove content) but how to use them for their own social purposes.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Many governments have developed methods to respond to this new information environment, which allows for fewer gatekeeper controls, by aggressively countering these new movements, often with a combination of traditional repression as well as novel methods aimed at addressing online media.”[/blockquote]

Double-edged sword

But that’s not the only problem: As Tufekci discussed previously in a post on Medium, the use of ubiquitous social tools by protest movements and dissidents is a double-edged sword: the fact that these tools make it so much easier to find like-minded individuals and organize them is a positive thing, because it allows a movement to grow and become effective much more rapidly, and to adapt to a changing environment.

At the same time, however, those same features may prevent protest groups from becoming as cohesive and robust as they need to be in order to survive over a long period of time. Old-fashioned political movements took years — or even decades — to develop and build an organization, and while that often meant that political change also took a lot longer to occur, the movements themselves were arguably more powerful.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]”Digital technologies certainly add to protester capabilities in many dimensions, but this comes with an unexpected trade-off: Digital infrastructure helps undertake functions that would have otherwise required more formal and long-term organizing which, almost as a side effect, help build organizational capacity to respond to long-term movement requirements.”[/blockquote]

In a sense, it’s probably fitting that social media would be a double-edged sword when it comes to political movements, since the internet as a whole has proven to be the same kind of thing: even as it facilitates piracy and arguably incites hatred and violence, it also promotes creativity and helps people in need find others who share their problems. We often want things to be either good or evil, but they rarely are. You can read Tufekci’s paper here.

]]>Tango down: Bangladesh blocks messaging apps amid protestshttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/19/tango-down-bangladesh-blocks-messaging-apps-amid-protests/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/19/tango-down-bangladesh-blocks-messaging-apps-amid-protests/#commentsMon, 19 Jan 2015 09:35:48 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=907548Bangladesh temporarily blocked the messaging apps Viber and Tango on Sunday after intelligence agencies asked the country’s telecoms regulator for help in quelling opposition protests. Reports suggested on Monday that the ban had been lifted early in the morning, allowing the apps’ traffic to move freely again after an outage of around 18 hours. The agencies had reportedly been concerned that they could not monitor communications between “terrorists and militants” that used the apps – anti-government protestors have been carrying out a transport blockade for a couple of weeks.
]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/19/tango-down-bangladesh-blocks-messaging-apps-amid-protests/feed/2Twitter fights Turkish order to block newspaper’s Twitter accounthttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/twitter-fights-turkish-order-to-block-newspapers-twitter-account/
http://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/twitter-fights-turkish-order-to-block-newspapers-twitter-account/#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2015 23:43:49 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=907396Twitter has received a court order from the Turkish government asking the service to block or remove the account belonging to one of the country’s newspapers, known as BirGün Halkin Gazetesi — which means One Day: The People’s Newspaper — but the company has refused to do so and says that it intends to fight the government demand in whatever way it can, including taking the authorities to court.

The court order (PDF link) was posted on Thursday at Chilling Effects, a site where both Twitter and Google post any demands they receive from governments, along with DMCA requests and other similar legal documents. Although sections of the document are redacted or blocked out, if you select the text and copy it, the words underneath become visible.

“It is determined that the Twitter accounts indicated within the annexed writ of the Branch Office of the Fight Against Cybercrimes of Police Department or other social media networks announced that they will broadcast information and documents.”

National security

The order says the public prosecutor’s office “is currently conducting an investigation” into an incident involving trucks owned by the National Intelligence Agency, and that this crime involves a number of suspects and members of criminal organizations who cannot be identified.

A source close to Twitter said the court order was filed after the newspaper published information on its front page that the Turkish government claimed might compromise its investigation or be used in the course of military or political espionage, and then proceeded to tweet links to the story from its official account, which is @Birgun_Gazetesi.

Turkey and Twitter have had a number of previous disagreements over orders to remove or block tweets and accounts. The government blocked the entire service at one point, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an said he would “wipe out” the company because people were using it to share information about a corruption investigation. Erdogan was later forced to remove the block because a court ruled it to be unconstitutional.

Twitter will fight

Based on the court order, Twitter — which has said many times that it is the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party” — said it had removed one of the accounts named in the document and blocked certain tweets from another account, but it intends to fight the order in court because a source close to the company said it wants to “take a harder line” with Turkey. In an unrelated case, a former TV presenter in Turkey faces up to five years in prison for a tweet that the government said suggested a cover-up in the recent corruption investigation.

In a statement emailed to Gigaom, a Twitter spokesman said that some tweets had been blocked using its “country withheld content” tool but the newspaper account remained online:

“We can confirm that yesterday Twitter received a court order demanding we remove an account belonging to a Turkish newspaper and followed by more than 330,000 users, or face blocking in Turkey. Out of the almost 60,000 Tweets on the account, Twitter withheld access in Turkey to the small number of Tweets that discussed the national security issue referenced in the order.”

A Twitter user posted a screenshot of what the newspaper’s Twitter account looks like from within Turkey, and it shows that a number of the tweets have been blocked for users in that country:

]]>http://gigaom.com/2015/01/16/twitter-fights-turkish-order-to-block-newspapers-twitter-account/feed/2Google fight over Mosley orgy shows censorship creep in Europehttp://gigaom.com/2015/01/15/google-fight-over-mosley-orgy-shows-censorship-creep-in-europe/
Thu, 15 Jan 2015 15:43:24 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=906750A rich, powerful man won a series of court victories in France and Germany that arguably helped pave the way for Europe’s controversial “right to be forgotten”, which has helped people erase history by scrubbing search engines. Now, that man is pushing a U.K. court to go a step further — and, unfortunately, it sounds like the court will agree.

As the BBC explains, Max Mosley was in the High Court this week demanding that Google be held accountable for images that show him romping with five German-speaking prostitutes in a prolonged S&M orgy in a posh London apartment.

Mosley, who is the former head of F1 racing and the son of a prominent U.K. fascist, already has the right to ask Google to remove specific search results that link to the pictures or videos in question. What he is seeking now is for the court to designate Google as a publisher in its own right, which would make it responsible for finding and deleting any other links that might appear in the future.

The distinction is crucial because a court ruling in Mosley’s favor would transform Google and other search engines from a passive directory into an active censor. It is the difference between asking a newsstand to remove a certain magazine that has an offensive image, versus making the newsstand responsible for ensuring the image never appears in any other publication it sells in the future.

To support his position, Mosley’s lawyers are pointing to a court ruling against the defunct tabloid News of the World, which was forced to pay Mosley £60,000 for defamation and violating his privacy. They say Google is similarly liable for violating a U.K. law known as the Data Protection Act.

Google’s lawyer, meanwhile, is asking the court to throw out the case on two grounds: that Mosley no longer has a privacy right in the images since they have been so widely disseminated, and because the search engine is not a publisher in the first place. As the FT reports:

“Max Mosley remains in the public eye as a campaigner for privacy rights and this has never been forgotten or receded into the past,” [the lawyer] told the court, adding that in legal terms Google was not a publisher of the images.

While the case would be quickly thrown out in a North American court, other news reports suggest Mosley’s argument gained traction with the judge. The Mirror, for instance, quotes the judge in the case as saying “damages may simply not be available” to Mosley, but that an injunction is “much less problematic.”

This distinction will be cold comfort for Google since Mosley, if the judge issues an injunction, will be in a position to seek damages or a contempt of court charge if Google fails to comply with an order not to display or link to the images.

In the bigger picture, Mosley’s latest gambit appears likely to cause Europe’s creeping cloak of internet censorship to expand further. And a U.K. ruling in his favor will also bring about a further fracturing of the internet as a whole, as North Americans see one version of the web — including the Mosley video — while Europeans see a different one punched full of holes.